I have been trying and trying to get Qgis Server to working on my Windows 7 machine with no luck. I have read every thread out there on the web related to how to install and nothing works. I'm beginning to think that it's all just a nasty joke that someone is trying to play and that there isn't really a Server available. If anyone has any step-by-step directions that actually work, would love to hear.

What osgeo4w installer did you use to install QGIS? Old 32bit one, or the new 32bit or 64bit ones?
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SaultDonNov 9 '13 at 20:43

The new 64bit installer includes the qgis-server package, but no apache. So you have to stick to the 32bit versions. By the way, at the time of asking there was only one installer...
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AndreJNov 13 '13 at 19:12

Maybe it will help if it's known what installer the OP used, because the new installers, especially the 64bit ones don't include apache, so that might need to be installed and configured separately. That tutorial might need to be tweaked.
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SaultDonNov 9 '13 at 20:41

I ran into the same problem using the old 32bit OSGeo4w installer from september 2013.

Apache installs without error logs, but the service throws only 500-Errors. alternatively, it downloads the qgis.mapserv.fcgi.exe instead of executing it.

After searching around I read about missing libfcgi.dll causing such problems.

The advanced installer of OSgeo4w offers a fcgi library, but that is not selected as dependency when choosing the qgis-server package. Alternatively I took the driver from my running ms4w installation.

The new 64bit installer of OSGeo4w has included the package fcgi as dependency, but is missing the whole apache package (up to now). So that's not working at all. By the way, qgis-server does not include qgis desktop as dependency, but will not run without that, I assume.

So the 32-bit installer is the only one that might run as QGIS server at the moment.